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Topic: Lumen Occasus (Read 1111 times)

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and through the intercessions of Mary, who is truly Theotokos and all the departed Saints of the Church Triumphant and all the memebers of the Church Militant, I, first amongst the sinners, pray for the Soul of the departed John Paul II, the Bishop of Rome and all the West, the champion of the Latin faith. May he find the rest in Your arms.

First slavic Pope. To me, who is also son of slavic people, John Paul II was the revelation that the "long time despised office of the arch-heretic" should be re-measured and in a new Light from the west I saw something that made me change oppinion of my Western brothers and sisters. My first theological oppinions have started to form in a fogg of serbo-croatian war in the Balkans. To me and many that was the war of Orthodoxy versus the Latinised heresy. Royal City, New Rome was being sacked again and I was a character from the book.

I was full of hate for everything western, latin... papal.

I was blind.

We orthodox have to admit to ourselves and to everybody that we did not belive John Paul II. For us, it was another Latin conspiracy. They were stealing our faithfull. Instead of teaching ourselves into dogmatic truth, the science of salvation, the holy Gospel, we decided to blame the Pope for our own fallings. Time after time, this Light from the West has tried to bring the "two lungs" closer. Returning Icons, begging for forgiveness, pleading, visiting... and we stayed stoned and unmovable. We did not show him the Christian charity. The sin is ours.

Knowing how much the division between East and West is hurting the slavs in particular and the Christedom in general, the Bishop of Rome has tried and tried to bring the two Lights of the Church, the two traditions of the Church back where they belong... in the same dark streets of this planet where they can shine and show The Way.

John Paul II the first slavic Pope was rejected by majority of Slavs. Did we miss the chance?

In the hope that the Maker of Heaven and Earth and everything visible and invisible will take the Soul of the Bishop of Rome and grant him peace I beg all of us to re-exam our position in regard to the great teaching of this unique man and his legacy. May God have mercy on his soul and give us the love for one another in these sad and hard times.

he next pope faces challenges so urgent that many church leaders and analysts worry that even a pontiff with the charisma and capacity of John Paul II will have to resort to a strategy of triage.

The rich nations pose one set of concerns: the church is withering in Europe, the continent that once supplied it with priests, cathedrals and intellect, while in the United States, the church is self-consciously struggling to make its message relevant in a materialistic society where even religion is market driven.

The poorer countries pose a different set of concerns: in Latin America, home to 4 of every 10 Catholics in the world, priests say they cannot compete with the exuberant, proliferating evangelical and Pentecostal churches. In Africa and Asia, growing Catholic populations live often uneasily among Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists.

The Roman Catholic church is, more than ever, a global institution with global problems. With more than one billion members, amounting to half the world's Christians and 17 percent of the world's population, it is the largest and wealthiest religious or charitable institution on the planet.

But the biggest concerns of the new century - the turmoil within the Muslim world and the explosive shift of economic power to India and China - did not draw the focus of John Paul. As he proved, the church's leader is capable of changing the course of history. But the church has to make choices.

"One question that the leadership of the church has to ask itself," said Christopher M. Bellitto, academic editor at Paulist Press, a large Catholic publishing house, "is will it invest most of its time and money and energy in what we used to call the Third World, or will it try to pull Europe and North America back from the materialism that John Paul II said was the curse of capitalism?"

The choice may be embodied in the choice of a new pope. In the weeks leading up to the conclave, the cardinals will be discussing among themselves not only who should lead, but what the church's priorities are. If they choose a candidate from Africa, or more likely, Latin America, it might signal that their primary concern is with the church in the Southern Hemisphere. Or they could choose a pope from Europe because he can speak convincingly to the West about its growing religious indifference.

Bishop Gerald F. Kicanas of Tucson, said, "As a church I think we're kind of tired and I think we've lost a little bit of our confidence." The church in the United States, and in countries like Austria and Ireland, is still reeling from the revelations of sexual abuse by priests. Bishop Kicanas's own diocese declared bankruptcy in the face of mounting lawsuits by alleged abuse victims.

He says he regularly meets Catholics who are hungry for spiritual teaching, but skeptical that the Catholic Church actually lives what it preaches. The major challenge facing the church is, he said, "to articulate the message of the faith in a way that's actually influential and convincing to people."

The most pressing problem facing the church, said Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, archbishop of Washington, is "the secularity of our society, the passivity of people with regard to things of God."

In the Third World, the church does not face the problem of making Christianity relevant. By serving the poor, refugees or people with AIDS, by speaking out on corruption, deforestation or global debt relief, churches are engaged in peoples' lives.

A crucial and sensitive challenge for the next pope is relations with Islam at a time when militant Islam is on the rise. The church under John Paul focused its major interfaith and ecumenical initiatives on mending relations with Jews and Orthodox Christianity. But now the most urgent interfaith dialogue must be with Muslims, said Daniel Thompson, a theology and religious studies professor at Fordham University.

"There are many countries in the world where the Christian and Muslim populations are at odds with each other," he said. "The south of the Philippines is dominated by a Muslim majority and the northern part is Catholic. There are tensions there."

There are disagreements among Catholic theologians, he said, about how to engage with Muslims, and which Muslims to engage. Some theologians want to acknowledge that "there has been a lot of historical damage wrought by people in the name of Christianity on the Muslim people," he said, while others believe the focus should be on the wrongs perpetrated by Muslim extremists more recently. The next pope should help the church set a clear direction, he said.

The church is also struggling to respond to the rapid developments in science and biotechnology. Cloning, stem-cell research and new possibilities for genetic screening and selection all test how to apply the church's moral teaching on the sanctity of life. Vatican conferences have taken up these questions, but the church will need a pope not only conversant with the issues, but with a clear vision on how to apply church teaching to these 21st-century developments.

George Weigel, senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a Catholic theologian, said in a January speech, "Many cardinal-electors have the sense that the world has, at best, a 10-to-20-year window in which to build the legal and regulatory structures necessary to channel humanity's new genetic knowledge, and its marriage to technology, in directions that will lead to healing and genuine human flourishing rather than to Huxley's nightmare."

The problem in Latin America, and among Hispanics in the United States, is the proliferation of Pentecostal churches with their exuberant worship services and ability to provide instant social networks for rural residents looking for work in cities.

The evangelical and Pentecostal churches in Latin America are powered by pastors who are often laypeople, outnumbering Catholic clergy who must be ordained and make a lifelong commitment to the church and to celibacy.

Mary Gautier, senior research associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, said the priest shortage is global: "Relative to the rest of the world the United States is in very good shape. South and Central America are very Catholic cultures, but people wait years to get their babies baptized. They may see a priest only once a year. They don't have access to the sacraments the way we expect to. If Americans can't get communion on Sunday we think there's something drastically wrong with our church."

While the church has grown by a quarter of a billion people during John Paul's 26-year papacy, the number of priests worldwide is about 400,000 - almost exactly the same as when he started his globe-trotting evangelization campaign. Where should the church send newly ordained priests when they are needed everywhere?

Bishop Ricardo Ram+Ãƒâ€šÃ‚Â¡rez, who serves the priest-poor diocese of Las Cruces, N.M., said, "I've asked my bishop friends in Mexico to send me priests, and they say, 'We'll keep you in mind, but right now our dioceses are growing and our cities are growing and we need all the priests we are getting.' "

Another challenge facing a global church is how much autonomy priests and bishops should be given to adapt church teaching and liturgy to their own cultures. After the second Vatican Council of the early 1960's, the plan was for greater regional autonomy from Rome. But John Paul recentralized church authority.

When the bishops from Asia held a synod in Rome in 1998, some of them confronted their colleagues in the Vatican with the autonomy issue, said the Rev. Peter Phan, a professor of Catholic Social Thought at Georgetown University. The bishop from Japan asked what the is point of composing all liturgical texts in Latin, then sending them to be translated to Japan, only to send them back to Rome for approval by Vatican officials who cannot read Japanese.

"The second thing on their minds is married clergy," said Father Phan. "They have been asking for the possibility of married clergy because in Asia the number of priests is small. And Rome simply does not answer."

The question of whether and how much local culture can be integrated into church practices goes back to the 15th century, Dr. Thompson, of Fordham, said. With the centralization of authority in the Vatican under John Paul II, how much autonomy to permit local bishops has again become a pressing issue, he said.

"That is a question that goes from St. Patrick's in New York all the way to Bangkok," Mr. Thompson said.

The Rev. Ian T. Douglas, professor of world mission and global Christianity at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., said, "When the Catholic Church was simply a Mediterranean church or a Western European church, it was a lot easier to know the limits of authority.

"You knew who's in and who's out," he said, "belief structures, tenets, doctrinal understandings. Now you have all these cultures, languages and peoples trying to find their way within a common fellowship."

Neela Banerjee and Andy Newman contributed reporting for this article.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and through the intercessions of Mary, who is truly Theotokos and all the departed Saints of the Church Triumphant and all the memebers of the Church Militant, I, first amongst the sinners, pray for the Soul of the departed John Paul II, the Bishop of Rome and all the West, the champion of the Latin faith. May he find the rest in Your arms.

First slavic Pope. To me, who is also son of slavic people, John Paul II was the revelation that the "long time despised office of the arch-heretic" should be re-measured and in a new Light from the west I saw something that made me change oppinion of my Western brothers and sisters. My first theological oppinions have started to form in a fogg of serbo-croatian war in the Balkans. To me and many that was the war of Orthodoxy versus the Latinised heresy. Royal City, New Rome was being sacked again and I was a character from the book.

I was full of hate for everything western, latin... papal.

I was blind.

We orthodox have to admit to ourselves and to everybody that we did not belive John Paul II. For us, it was another Latin conspiracy. They were stealing our faithfull. Instead of teaching ourselves into dogmatic truth, the science of salvation, the holy Gospel, we decided to blame the Pope for our own fallings. Time after time, this Light from the West has tried to bring the "two lungs" closer. Returning Icons, begging for forgiveness, pleading, visiting... and we stayed stoned and unmovable. We did not show him the Christian charity. The sin is ours.

Knowing how much the division between East and West is hurting the slavs in particular and the Christedom in general, the Bishop of Rome has tried and tried to bring the two Lights of the Church, the two traditions of the Church back where they belong... in the same dark streets of this planet where they can shine and show The Way.

John Paul II the first slavic Pope was rejected by majority of Slavs. Did we miss the chance?

In the hope that the Maker of Heaven and Earth and everything visible and invisible will take the Soul of the Bishop of Rome and grant him peace I beg all of us to re-exam our position in regard to the great teaching of this unique man and his legacy. May God have mercy on his soul and give us the love for one another in these sad and hard times.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Now that was a really humble and brotherly post. Too bad our bishops can't have the same humility.God bless you.

In a Western Institution such as the Latin church which has murdered thousands of Protestants, women who were accused as being witches murdered, eliminated whole races such as the Aztecs in Southern America,and the atrocities of the Crusades which murdered Muslims and fellow Christians....where is the Light in such a church? There is only one True Light.